Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) modules are used in various telecommunication and data networking applications to interface between a printed circuit card in a network device and a network cable, wherein the cable may be electrical or fiber-optic. Typically, the SFP receptacle (denoted “connector” in SFP terminology) is mounted on the printed circuit card with appropriate electrical connections to the circuit traces on the card, and a termination plug (denoted “module”) containing a transceiver at the end of the cable plugs into the receptacle.
The mechanical and electrical characteristics of various SFP modules have been defined by industry organizations. For example, the SFP+ specification defines hot-pluggable modules that may be used at data rates up to 10 Gb/s. Details of these modules have been set forth by the SFF Committee in the “SFF-8431 Specifications for Enhanced Small Form Factor Pluggable Module SFP+,” Revision 4.1, Jul. 6, 2009, which is incorporated herein by reference.
Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP) modules are used in similar applications to the SFP modules described above and support four parallel communication channels at 10 Gb/s. The mechanical and electrical characteristics of QSFP modules are described in the “INF-8438i Specification for Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP) Transceiver Specifications,” Revision 1.0, November, 2006, which is also incorporated herein by reference.
The above QSFP specifications include a management interface with a memory map of the QSFP transceiver for serial Identification (ID), digital monitoring and certain control functions (e.g., section 6.6 of the INF-8438i specification). In particular, bytes 224-255 of EEPROM page 00h may be used for Vendor Specific ID functions (e.g., section 6.6.2.29 of the INF-8438i specification).